The name still means nothing.
The 1001 list deems Bangai-O Spirits "a game that defies description", a shooter merged with a puzzler with levels inspired by other video games. Wikipedia just goes with "action" because you do things, I guess.
The name rang a bell, but I think I was confusing it with something like Boktai for the Game boy Advance. Playing the original Bangai-O for this 1001 list a few years back clearly didn't leave me with a lasting impression...
What, then, does this handheld sequel that diverges quite a bit from the first game have to offer us? Some kind of chocolate firework? I think the 1001 list needs to go and lie down for a little bit.
Fun Times
The overly anime characters of Bangai-O have been replaced with slightly less in-your-face anime characters whose names have escaped me, save for the Professor, who will be my guide to the world of Bangai-O Spirits.
Bangai-O Spirits is a Nintendo DS shooter of sorts. You pilot a tiny giant mech around the bottom screen in search of targets to destroy using your sizeable arsenal, which includes simple ranged attacks, charged sweeping bursts, bodyslams and more, mapped to both the face and shoulder buttons.
I'm emulating this game, and when you unleash a whole bunch of bouncing missiles around the place, you can start to see the code creaking under the pressure. It's a zippy little game, which even goes so far as to poke a little fun at itself in saying that it can't show you every single one of the hundreds of shots you'll eventually be firing at once.
Did it slow to a crawl on the Nintendo DS itself? I have to assume it wouldn't have seen the light of day if it did, but it can slow down a good bit here.
The tutorials introduce you to everything, from fixed firing positions to flying around, to fixing your position in midair to shoot some more, all the way up to interacting with objects to bounce them around the stage to complete an objective.
It's bordering on a physics-based puzzler at this point, which you just don't expect after a bunch of levels where you have to aim what you'd think are normal shooter-like weapons.
Frustrations
After a short while, the tutorials took a turn for the worse. I was following them well enough at first, and if I wasn't sure what the characters were saying, actually getting into a level and doing something often did the job of getting the point across.
You've got some kind of charged shot that counts up to 100 and then unleashes up to 100 projectiles out in a cone towards whatever you're aiming at, in this tutorial a bunch of incoming missiles and the launchers that shot them.
The emulator was struggling, and soon I would be as well.
I just didn't have a clue what I was doing wrong in this tutorial. I had some napalm rounds that were great at swatting incoming missiles out of the sky, which would clear my path so that I could destroy the turrets to literally clear my path, eventually towards my actual targets.
The game has a mechanic where you can mix your weapons so that you can having bouncing homing missiles, for example, or bouncing missiles and homing missiles. One of the characters mirrors my own attitude in saying words to the effect of "Yeah, whatever, I'll just stick with mixing them. Why wouldn't I?", but I think this particular tutorial was trying and failing to get me to separate Napalm from Break, though it had a funny way of doing so when it actively told me that my weapons were a mix of the two for the benefits of both.
A little annoyed at not getting the details, I figured I'd got the gist of enough of the controls to at least get into a normal game and see what's what. If I could even find some sort of campaign.
In what feels like 30 seconds, I was gone, with a grand score of 3 points. I don't even know how I did that. I can see one of my targets has disappeared. Guess I got lucky?
Final Word
I closed Bangai-O Spirits there and then, not necessarily because of the emulation issues I was having with it, but because I just wasn't getting the point of the game. I didn't know why I was here or what I was doing.
Was it a shooter where I'd have to master my weaponry and use the right type of shot at the right time to be effective? Was it a puzzle game where I happened to be controlling a flying mech? It's both, and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that I don't want both at the same time.
The original Bangai-O saw me confused, yes, but I recognised that as a weird shooter. Bangai-O Spirits is even weirder. It doesn't make much sense to me at all. What's with all the fruit? Is that just a throwback to arcade games of the past?
What is this game? A bit of fun for fans of shooters? A puzzler for those who think puzzle games don't have enough explosions?
Whatever it is, it hasn't captured my attention and probably won't get a second look - and I can't even explain why. The controls seem simple enough. Your objective is clear. What am I missing, other than the point in playing this at all?
Fun Facts
User-generated levels could be shared via sound, the microphones of nearby Nintendo DS's picking up the data within and unpacking it into a playable level, just like the cassette games of old, or that failed Chirp extension on Chrome. Well, failed in my experience, certainly.
Bangai-O Spirits, developed by Treasure, first released in 2008.
Version played: Nintendo DS, 2008, via emulation.